I sure don’t, because I’m 33 years old and came of age when it was beaten into your head that cigarettes were horrifyingly harmful to your health and would kill you if you so much as looked at one.
It must have worked, because I haven’t even put my lips on a cigarette in my adult life.
I can’t say the same for the subject of our story today, Xochitl Gonzalez, a writer for New York Magazine who longs for the days when it was socially acceptable, nay, even cool to light up a cig.
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Gonzalez gifted us her pièce de résistance in the form of an article titled, “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?” (I can feel my teeth clenching already).
You’re more than welcome to read the whole thing yourself (though I wouldn’t advise it), but basically it all boils down to the fact that Gonzalez wants to start smoking again, and she is seriously considering it for the sole fact that she’s not worried about living or dying anymore because the world is “just so screwed up, man!”
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time,” Gonzalez begins her article, “It started sometime after we kidnapped the president of Venezuela but before we watched Alex Pretti get shot and killed by Customs and Border Patrol agents. Or maybe it was between their detaining young Liam Ramos in his bunny hat and their releasing that tranche of Epstein files and nothing happening.”
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Jesus, if ever there were a poster child for elder Millennial, early Gen X angst.
You’re welcome, by the way, for Maduro. “Kidnapping” is a weird word for capturing and arraigning a narco-terrorist, authoritarian, murdering dictator, but to each their own.
Gonzalez goes on to say the idea to start smoking again stemmed from a video she saw on social media, because my generation and younger can’t formulate a single, original thought without being spoon-fed it through an algorithm.
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“A woman named Stephanie Wittels Wachs was suddenly on my Instagram scroll, reminiscing, longingly, about smoking in the ’90s. Obviously, she clarified, she wasn’t going to smoke; she was just thinking about it. Because smoking kills you. And if she died, she figured, who would take care of her kids? Very solid point, I thought. Then I remembered: I don’t have any kids.”
A childless woman in her 40s is an insufferable liberal? It’s almost too on the nose.
She spends the next several paragraphs waxing poetic and nostalgically about the ’90s and early 2000s, when smoking was “sexy” and “chic,” and before that mean old Michael Bloomberg made it harder to smoke indoors.
“Since nobody seemed to care that smoking was bad for us, our paternalistic mayor, Michael Bloomberg, decided he needed to care for us. Public indoor smoking was banned, and, inadvertently, we were armed with a new way to flirt. There was nothing better than breaking off from a crowd of friends with an invitation outside to share a cigarette… Would this be a brief excursion to the sidewalk? Or might it end the next morning, in a bed you didn’t really know, sharing smoke-tinged kisses?”
Ah, yes! Nothing sexier than swapping spit and smoke, I tell ya!
After her history lesson on smoking in Brooklyn in the 90s and 2000s, Gonzalez reveals that the final contribution to her tobacco-tinged cravings came in the form of a friend visiting that had recently taken up smoking again.
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“‘When did you start smoking again?’ I asked as I wrapped my arm in hers. We walked and talked, and she told me of a trip to Italy and questioning, at almost 50, how much damage a few cigarettes a week could really do to her. Her kids were basically teenagers; how much longer did she really need to stay perfectly healthy for? She meant this nihilistically and practically.”
Oh, so this lady does have kids and she’s smoking too? Gonzalez might as well have been given the green light at this point.
By the way, her friend is a scumbag.
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Her kids being teenagers shouldn’t be a reason to let her health and wellbeing go straight to hell. I’m sure your children would love to have a mom present in their lives in their 20s and 30s.
Grandkids? Pshaw!
One of the best parts of the article is when Gonzalez tries to justify her nagging nicotine itch by saying it’s no different than being surrounded by technology all the time.
“But maybe what I can do is stop what I’m doing, ask somebody to come outside, and take five minutes to slow down with me while I engage in the very dangerous act of holding a flaming stick to my face. This could be my rebellion. Is it really any worse for us than the numbing digital go-go-go it feels we’ve all been engaged in?”
So, you’re giving up one harmful vice for another? Got it.
How about putting your phone down and going for a walk? You don’t need to replace doomscrolling with emphysema-in-a-stick.
Also, I think smoking is slightly more harmful to your health than being on Instagram for a couple hours a day, but then again, I’m no doctor.
Gonzalez delivers her grand finale in spectacular form, the nihilism of a childless, godless, doom-stricken liberal oozing surely from her fingers as she typed this.
“And, truth be told, unlike in my high-school days, I’m no longer certain that the future I’ve been preserving myself for is all that promising. Sure, I can eat as clean as I want, but does it matter when there are forever chemicals in the soil? If we’re walking into dinner parties wondering if the third course will include nuclear war, is there really a point in sacrificing a quick thrill in the now?”
Listen, I’m not sure “we’re all gonna die anyway” is the compelling argument you think it is, but it certainly reveals a lot about this lady. Some of it is funny, as we have discussed, but other parts are quite sad.
This is a woman presumably at least in her early to mid 40s, given the timeline of smoking in her youth, with no children who feels like she doesn’t have anything left to live for?
How depressing is that?
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It’s easy to sit here and dunk on liberals and leftists for being these hysterical caricatures who are offended by everything, but if you peel the skin back, they start to look a lot like Xochitl Gonzalez.
Sure, she has a flawed outlook on life, but there’s definitely some pain behind the layers of irony and nihilism she cakes onto her prose.
I don’t think she is ambivalent towards death. I think she’s depressed because she woke up one day in her 40s and realized she has nothing to live for.
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Don’t smoke cigarettes, kids.
I watched my father-in-law die a very painful death from Stage 4 lung cancer because he was a pack-a-day smoker from the time he started driving.
My son was born with only one grandpa because my wife’s dad couldn’t put the Marlboros down so he could live long enough to hold his first and, to this point, only grandchild.
I can’t tell Xochitl Gonzalez how to live her life, but I hope she realizes that just because a Republican president is in office she doesn’t have to kill herself through inadvertent means.
Yes, the world is an awful place. But it was awful when Obama and Biden were in office, too.
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Don’t let politics dictate your life decisions.
Put the cigarette down and go outside. Seriously, it will do wonders for your mental and physical health.
Who knows, you may even live long enough to see Brooklyn girl-boss AOC become President of the United States.
Crazier things have happened.
